Enrique López Oliva remembers the days when Cuban Catholics hung their religious icons in their grandmother’s rooms, hoping that Fidel Castro’s communist government would not dare punish an “abuelita.”
In the 1970s and ’80s, practicing almost any religion was a stain on Cubans’ records that could land them in prison and block promotions at work or admission to the right university studies for themselves and their children.
In turn, Pope John XXIII excommunicated Castro in 1962, some priests denied communion to his militias and three served as chaplains for the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion that tried to topple Castro.
But church-state relations have come a long way since those days, and Pope Benedict XVI will find a much warmer atmosphere when he visits Cuba March 26-28 to mark the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the Our Lady of Charity statue at El Cobre, the island’s patron saint.
“The government sees the church as a counterpart, someone it can talk to,” said exiled Catholic activist Pablo Alfonso. Church officials now are allowed to run scores of once-banned charity and educational programs, to fix up some of the churches that were crumbling and to import religious and humanitarian items.
Raúl Castro has met several times with Cardinal Jaime Ortega y Alamino, agreed to free 52 jailed dissidents after one such meeting in 2010 and accepted his plea to call off mobs harassing the dissident Ladies in White.
“The church has recovered much of the space it lost in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s,” said López Oliva, a retired church history professor at the University of Havana.
Church and state had a brief honeymoon after Fidel Castro’s revolution toppled the Batista dictatorship in 1959 and promised social justice and democracy.
Bishops applauded Castro laws giving farm lands to peasants and better homes to the urban poor.
But hostilities broke out one day before the Bay of Pigs assault in 1961, when Castro declared his revolution would follow the socialist path to communism.
“The conflict that erupts between church and revolution — in fact between parts of society and revolution — comes out of Castro’s turn to communism,” said Alfonso, a journalist and former political prisoner who wrote a book on Castro-church relations.
Castro never broke diplomatic relations with the Vatican, but clamped harsh controls on the island’s church. No priests were executed, and he once said he wanted not martyrs but “apostates” — those who forsake their religion.
Franciscan priest Miguel Loredo was sentenced in 1966 to 15 years in prison for harboring a former seminarian and alleged fugitive from the police, later identified as a Castro intelligence agent on a provocation mission.
“The church was repressed, more than persecuted,” Juan Clark, a Miami-Dade College professor emeritus of sociology who has authored two books on the Cuban church, told El
Nuevo Herald.
Castro eventually seized all church schools and administrative buildings, shuttered all its publications and nationalized its presses, banned street processions and blocked church officials’ access to the government’s monopoly on the mass media.
He cancelled Christmas as a holiday in 1969. The national constitution approved in 1976 declared the government officially atheist.
Church leaders and activists began to come out of their shell in 1986, with a document issued at the end of a week-long gathering known as the National Cuban Church Encounter.
Although it defended many of the church’s past policies, the document urged reconciliation and declared that socialism “helped us to have more regard for human beings … and showed us how to give, because of justice, what we used to give as charity.”
That document “is considered the most important reflection by the Cuban church in its 500-year history,” López Oliva told El Nuevo Herald by phone from his home in Havana.
Around that time, Castro also was reexamining his own positions on religion during chats with Brazilian liberation theologian Frai Betto, and a wobbly Soviet Union was cutting back on its subsidies to the island, estimated at $4 to $5 billion a year.
The frigid waters of church-state relations began to warm up.
In 1991, the Communist Party erased its atheist canon and allowed believers to join.
The government allowed the church to open an island chapter of its humanitarian branch, Caritas, in that same year, and to organize several street processions in 1992.
Pope John Paul II appointed Ortega as Cardinal in 1994 — Cuba’s first since Arteaga died — and Castro visited Rome in 1996 to invite the Polish-born and anti-communist pontiff to visit Cuba. He restored Christmas in 1997.
In preparation for the pope’s momentous visit the following Jan. 21-25, the Cuban church regained more ground, with permissions to import needed materials and for Ortega to speak on government radio and television.
Church weddings, baptisms and attendance at masses shot up.
And John Paul’s nationally televised masses across the island drew hundreds of thousands, including Castro — even though there has been no sign that his excommunication has been lifted.
Today, with the 85-year-old Fidel Castro out of power and his more pragmatic brother Raúl facing a stagnant economy, the Cuban church and government have developed a deeper relationship.
“The church is now a partner with Raúl in the search for a more productive, more effective system,” said Clark, “and creating a favorable atmosphere for a transition without violence.”
In an island where no new churches had been built since 1959, the government allowed the construction of a new seminary and green-lighted the renovation of several churches — mostly paid with donations from abroad.
It also made it easier for foreign-born priests to serve on the island, church officials said.
Almost every large diocese now runs educational programs on topics like computing and languages, as well as free soup kitchens and medical dispensaries and libraries. Some have weekly raffles of food and other items.
The relationship between Castro and Ortega has clearly extended to sensitive political issues.
The San Juan de Letran convent in Havana has been hosting frank discussions on the need for change between Catholic thinkers and government officials like Eusebio Leal, the influential “mayor” of Old Havana.
After Ortega met with Castro in 2010, government-organized mobs stopped the worst harassments of the Ladies in White in Havana, though efforts by the women to stage street protests elsewhere remain blocked.
Ortega also made the announcement in 2010 that Castro had agreed to free 52 dissidents jailed since 2003. Some dissidents criticized the cardinal when most of the 52 — about 60 others freed — agreed to go directly from prison to exile in Spain.
Clark said he believes the cardinal has been too weak in some of his dealings with the Castro government.
In the end, added Clark, a church that has been around for 2,000 years will certainly survive its patch of rocky relations with the Castro governments.
“The church is looking for spaces slowly, without wounding anyone,” he said. “It has time to wait.”